The FBI announced some good news this week. Violent crime dramatically fell last year, representing the biggest drop since the 1930s. The news follows America having the lowest murder rate since the dawn of the 20th century.
One would think this would be greeted with joy and hailed as a sign the Trump administration is delivering law and order. But you would be mistaken. My post sharing the news was DELUGED with outraged X users. Many Americans, particularly right-wingers, strongly believe crime has never been higher. Any evidence saying otherwise is fake. The only reason we have fewer murders is because of medical advances. We have more violence than ever before though.
These opinions would have had merit just a few years ago. Following the George Floyd Revolution, America experienced an unprecedented surge in crime. Murder rates skyrocketed all over the country, with many cities surpassing previous records. All kinds of horrible crimes proliferated, from carjackings to mass looting. And it was all allowed by the politicians who felt it was worse to arrest criminals than the crimes committed. Racial sensitivity took precedence over public safety. When liberals were confronted with this reality, they then tried to blame COVID rather than Black Lives Matter and soft-on-crime policies.
Many still believe this is the situation today. That’s no longer the case. Crime has gone down across the board, as illustrated in the murder rate. There wasn’t a sudden medical breakthrough in 2023 that accounts for the murder drop. Non-fatal shootings have also plummeted since the early 2020s. There are a number of scandals involving police fudging the numbers but it’s extremely difficult to hide murders. Additionally, the National Crime Victimization Survey, which relies on different data from that of the FBI and is less beholden to official manipulation, found a dramatic drop in crime after 2023. Even a hellhole like Memphis has seen a substantial drop in violent crime in part due to Trump’s surge of troops and federal law enforcement to the city.
Total crime could be worse now than it was in the mid-2010s. From personal experience, DC and a few other cities do feel worse than how they were a decade ago. But America is less deadly, and we are far less prone to race riots than we were a decade ago.
We do have fewer murders now thanks to medical advances. But this has been a factor for nearly 40 years. The lethality of shootings in the country has remained roughly the same since the late 1980s. It even had a minor bump in the early 2020s, which would further debunk the notion that the only reason we have fewer murders now is due to better medical care. The real medical breakthroughs happened in the wake of the Vietnam War, not during the Obama administration. That’s not to say we haven’t gotten better over the last 40 years. It’s just that the chances for a stabbing or shooting victim to survive were already much better during the height of our murder wave than they were in 1960.
We have fewer murders now because we have fewer aggravated assaults. Any other explanation misses the big picture.
It’s an objective fact that crime is down from the early 2020s and is far lower than what it was in the ‘90s. But our crime rate is still significantly higher than that of Europe and the rest of the developed world. It’s still a problem for us, even if it’s relatively better than at any point in recent history.
Why is the Right so upset with this basic fact? One is due to the misunderstanding that the post-Floyd crime wave persists today. That’s no longer the case, as amply demonstrated above.
Another reason is that thanks to smartphones and social media, we’re more aware of individual crimes than we were 30 years ago. We now see horrors like Iryna Zarutska’s stabbing with our own eyes. The same goes with teen takeover and other criminal activity. But more videos of crime doesn’t mean more crime. We live in a society where everything is surveilled and people can instantly share clips of assaults and stabbings. If you spend any amount of time on RW Twitter, you’ll see these videos constantly. Even normies see this stuff on Instagram and TikTok. But this is just a sign of how crime is better documented today. The bloodshed of the 80s and ‘90s was reflected in body bags away from the public eye. But people who lived at that time certainly felt the danger of crime. It’s how Bill Clinton was able to get a bipartisan crime bill through Congress–with the support of black lawmakers. It’s unthinkable to imagine black lawmakers doing the same today. That’s how bad the crime was.
What may be the ultimate reason for the disbelief in declining crime is ideological hang-ups. Many right-wingers think modern America is an absolute hellhole. It’s never been more dangerous than today. We can’t even shop anymore, which is why we no longer have Blockbuster or Toys R Us (yes, people unironically tell me this). Back in the day, we didn’t even have drug addicts on the street (don’t look up the crack epidemic). Now they’re everywhere. This is why America needs radical solutions, such as what Nayib Bukele has done in El Salvador.
Being informed that America is now much safer upsets this view. Instead of reflecting on that, they retreat to their own bubble and grasp for any way to disprove the crime decline. They seem to think their worldview would be discredited by accepting the facts before them.
But that’s a mistake. Our crime decline is driven by factors that liberals would be repelled by.
The two big reasons for the decline are demographics and tough-on-crime measures. Criminologist Barry Latzer explained the demographic causes in the Wall Street Journal in 2022. At that time, crime was out of control and it seemed America may be returning to the dark days of the early ‘90s. But Latzer disagreed. He noted that crime rose after the 1960s for a variety of reasons:
large-scale rural-to-urban migration of African-Americans and immigration to big cities of Hispanic populations with high violent-crime rates, massive growth in the youth population, and a weak criminal-justice system. One might throw in a fourth: The crack-cocaine epidemic, which sent crime soaring after it began to ease in the early ’80s.
But all four factors have substantially changed over the last 40 years. The black population is now remarkably older and less concentrated in urban areas than it was in the past. The gentrifiers who pushed them out commit far less crime than they do, as do the immigrants who have also replaced them. The justice system was made much stronger thanks to federal and state laws passed since the 1970s. The crack epidemic was thankfully curtailed in the ‘90s. We still have drug problems but it now causes more deaths of despair than violent crime.
Latzer basically argued that the decline and dispersal of the native-born black American (NBA) population contributed to America’s increasing safety.
The surge in crime in the early 2020s, which upended long-term trends, largely owed to cities and some states giving up on the policies that restored public safety after the bloody crack epidemic. While not all officials realized their errors, many mayors and district attorneys did and quietly restored these policies in response to the crime surge. Unsurprisingly, actually enforcing the law reduced crime.
An additional factor that contributed to the disorder of the Biden era was the flood of illegals who came here. Trump’s immigration crackdown has sent many of these criminals home.
To reiterate, tough-on-crime policies and black decline made America safer. If anything, this vindicates a right-wing worldview.
We still have many problems in this country, such as mass immigration and anti-white racism. There are other forbidden truths the media and education system hide from the people, such as our horrific crime rates following the Civil Rights Revolution and George Floyd’s death. It’s stupid to share in those delusions just so we can imagine we’ve never had worse crime than we do now.
It’s just not true.
You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.
Another reason is that the opioid epidemic died out.
Like the earlier crack epidemic eventually some combination of those vulnerable to it dying off and new measures to control it being implemented.
I think the reason that right-wingers don't accept this is that murder was never really something that bothered them. Two black gangbangers killing each other over drugs doesn't really involve them. It was only that murder was correlated with other things.
What bothers right wingers is something like "civil disorder". It's whether there are going to be needles in the park or some schitzo shouting at you on the subway. These interactions don't always turn violent, but they are the opposite of civilziation. They are also harder to get hard data on.
In many places it is a staggeringly small number of people responsible for most crimes. The evidence from BART installing proper fare gates is telling "Workers spent nearly 1,000 fewer hours cleaning up after unruly passengers in the six months following the gates’ installation, compared with the six months before. Crime on BART fell by 41 percent last year" - that from an Atlantic article of all places.
In terms of the violence question it is still the seemingly random nature of the violence that is causing RWers online to continue to be disturbed by it. There are also plenty of stories emerging now of lenient Judges who are retreating from the tough-on-crime approach. The RW media and ecosystem would do well to make a big deal about these judges and that because that will erode many of the gains made.